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FOR FIXINGYOUR FUNNEL:HIGHER EDUCATIONEDITION
THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TOMARKETING TACTICS
A marketing strategy that fits your higher education funnel is crucial in helping
prospective students move forward in their decision process. By developing
strategic content and campaigns for specific stages of their decision-making
journey, you are more likely to be the school of choice when it comes time for
those students to apply.
ASSESS AND ADJUST
The first step in determining if there is a problem with your funnel is assessing
your funnel performance. There are three key places you should look for
benchmark data to determine where your institution may be lagging:
Industry Benchmarks
Internal Benchmarks
Competitors’ Benchmarks
In this guide, we’ll give you the key higher education numbers you need to begin
the assessment of your funnel. We will also provide the necessary tactics to help
you boost your performance for full funnel optimization once you determine
where your funnel may be leaking.
BOOST YOUR PERFORMANCE FOR FULL FUNNEL OPTIMIZATION
3 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
Top of Funnel
Website Visitors ...................................................................................................
Lead Conversion Rate ........................................................................................
Middle of Funnel
MQLs to Opportunities ....................................................................................
Return Visitors ......................................................................................................
Email Marketing ...................................................................................................
Bottom of Funnel
Qualified Opportunity-to-Customer Conversion Rate ..........................
Cost per Customer Acquisition ......................................................................
Top of Funnel
Blog ...........................................................................................................................
High-Value Offer Content .................................................................................
Bridging the Gap in the Funnel: Your Website
A Lead Generator..................................................................................................
A Lead Nurturer ...................................................................................................
Middle of Funnel
Personalization .....................................................................................................
Marketing Automation ......................................................................................
Remarketing ..........................................................................................................
Email Marketing ...................................................................................................
Bottom of Funnel
Sales Enablement ................................................................................................
CRM Integration ...................................................................................................
What’s Inside This Guide?TACTICS
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ASSESSMENT
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4 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
Assessment
5 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
Your business’s website acts as your digital hub, promoting and
representing your brand and all of its offerings. As you focus on
generating leads and new business, the number of visitors to your
website represents an important KPI (Key Performance Indicator) for
your marketing strategy.
How do you stack up against your industry peers?
Source: Google Analytics
TOP OF FUNNEL
Website Visitors
6,814AVERAGE
6,726MEDIAN
....
....
....
....
....
..
MONTHLY VISITORS IN EDUCATION
6 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
To generate leads, you may be running focused campaigns through
channels like Paid Search, Paid Social, or a targeted media placement
campaign. One of the key metrics you’ll be watching is your conversion
rate: the percentage of website visitors who meet your desired goal.Lead Conversion Rate
Source: MarketingSherpa
8%EDUCATION OR HEALTHCARE
AVERAGE CONVERSION RATE SITS BETWEEN 5-10%.
How does your campaign compare?
7 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
Generating prospects is one thing; converting them to an opportunity is
another. Nurturing your leads who show buying intent—commonly called
marketing-qualified leads (MQLs)—to real opportunities is a crucial
metric at the middle of the funnel.
According to an analysis of hundreds of B2B companies by Salesforce,
the average company converts 13% of its MQLs to opportunities
MIDDLE OF FUNNEL
MQLs to Opportunities
Source: Salesforce
13%AVERAGE COMPANYCONVERTS
OF ITS MQLS TO OPPORTUNITIES
8 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
Nurturing potential customers requires bringing them back to your site.
By monitoring your Return Visitor Rate (RVR), you can keep track of
how well your marketing efforts “stick.”
While RVR may vary across industries, many market research firms
recommend staying above 30%.
Return Visitors
Source: MarketingSherpa
30%MARKET RESEARCH FIRMS RECOMMEND STAYING ABOVE
FOR YOUR RETURNVISITOR RATE
9 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
Email marketing is arguably one of the most efficient ways to
communicate and nurture leads to convert. To measure the efficacy
of your emails, you’ll want to look primarily at open rates and click-through rates. Compare your performance to your industry peers.Email
Marketing
Source: Silverpop, 2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study
UNIQUE OPEN RATE IN SCHOOLS & EDUCATION
30.9%MEAN
27.3%MEDIAN
....
....
....
....
....
..
58.7% 8.4%BOTTOM QUARTILE
....
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....
....
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..
........................................ ........................................
TOP QUARTILE
OPEN RATES
10 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
CLICK–THROUGH RATESEmail Marketing
Source: Silverpop, 2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study
UNIQUE CLICK-THROUGH RATES IN SCHOOLS & EDUCATION
4.3%MEAN
1.8%MEDIAN
....
....
....
....
....
..
13.1% 0.2%BOTTOM QUARTILE
....
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....
....
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..
........................................ ........................................
TOP QUARTILE
11 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
BOTTOM OF FUNNEL
Qualified Opportunity- to-Customer Conversion Rate
As your qualified leads enter the bottom of the funnel, your sales team
should be closing, closing, closing.
But how well are they performing?
A 2014 report by the Aberdeen Group shows that the average sales
team achieves a 29% close-win rate on all qualified opportunities.
Source: Abedeen Group
29%THE AVERAGE SALES TEAM ACHIEVES A
CLOSE-WIN RATE ON ALL QUALIFIED OPPORTUNITIES
12 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
Cost per Customer Acquisition
Once you convert an opportunity to a real-life customer, you’ll want to
keep a close eye on the costs spent to acquire that customer. In general,
check your costs at least twice a year and after every big campaign.
While specific costs range too wildly to provide accurate benchmarks,
the general rule of thumb is that the lifetime value (LTV) of your
customers should be at least three times your cost to acquire customers
(CAC).
For example, if your average LTV is $3,000, then your CAC should be
roughly $1,000 or less.
Source: Geckoboard and Klipfolio
13 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
Tactics
14 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
Top of FunnelFILLING THE FUNNEL
Stop right here if your Top of Funnel Assessment revealed gaps in your
strategy.
For 80% of marketers1, lead generation is the number one goal for 2016.
If you find yourself in that group, then you owe it to yourself to explore
new tactics and new perspectives for expanding your reach and drawing
prospects to your pipeline.
Blog
Even with platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook dominating the
ways in which people consume content, blogs still play a significant role in
your top-of-the-funnel strategy.
As of 2016, 52% of marketers rank blogs as the most critical component
of their content marketing success1. That number shouldn’t surprise you.
Blogs are owned content, meaning all the benefits belong to you—rather
than sharing them with third-party social media sites.
With each post you publish, you’re building search engine equity for your
brand. Google and the like index those pages, rank your site higher, and
provide more opportunities for you to be found by prospects. Your efforts
result in higher quality leads: Organic search engine leads have a 14.6%
close rate when compared to outbound leads of only 1.7%2.
“CLIENT SPOTLIGHT” Horizon Beverage Shares Thought Leadership through
its “Education & Expertise” Blog
15 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
High-Value Offer Content
According to Demand Gen, 61% of B2B buyers select vendors who create
content that meet the buyers’ needs at each stage of their decision
process3. Creating high-value offer content is not only crucial to capture
leads at the top of the funnel, it also helps your potential buyers identify
you as a respected brand.
Think about the questions potential prospects are hoping to answer
during these early buying stages. Maybe they’re asking:
What’s new in the market?
What should I do to improve my position and business?
Why are things not working as well as I hoped?
Your job, in turn, is to answer these questions with valuable, research-
driven insights that reflect your brand’s core values. After that, you
simply set up a slick landing page and easy-to-use lead capture form.
Once a user submits, you provide the content. They receive the right
research, and you receive a new prospect.
Types of Content to Offer:
1. On-demand Webinars
2. Survey Reports
3. Assessments
4. Research Findings
5. Interactive Tools
1Content Institute’s B2B Content Marketing 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends
2NewsCred 50 Stats You Need to Know About Content Marketing
3Demand Gen 2014 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey
16 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
Bridging the Gap in the Funnel: Your Website
A Lead GeneratorYour website still ranks as the top channel for driving leads1. As the digital
store front of your business, your website should educate and attract users
to your brand, provide details around your solutions and offers, and then
prompt those users to connect with you—either via lead capture form,
general email inquiry, or over the phone.
A Lead NurturerBut just because your website has captured the lead doesn’t make its job
complete. Your website should act as a hub of useful content for all stages
of the buyer’s journey to address the needs and pain points as prospects
get more serious about considering your business.
We’ll discuss more about middle-funnel tactics in the next section, but
most of our advice requires an efficient and flexible website made for all
stages of the buyer’s journey. If your website is only set up to capture and
not nurture prospects, your website is only doing half its job.
It may be time for a new strategy and redesigned site.
Before you flip the page to learn how to address weaknesses in the middle
of your sales funnel, let’s discuss the elephant in the room: your website.
Your website is more than a tactic—it’s a platform. And as such, it lives in
this nebulous state in the funnel. It’s not 100% top of funnel, but it’s not
completely middle or bottom either.
In truth, your website’s job changes based on the context of your
prospects’ position in the funnel. When it’s designed right, your website
can adapt on the fly to meet the needs of your users.
1eMarketer The State of Lead Capture in 2016
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17 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
Middle of FunnelTHE SAGGY MIDDLE
Has the middle of your funnel grown a little saggy? As you cast your net
out wider to capture new leads, you risk snagging a few undeveloped
leads. But this is true of most organizations: About 50% of leads
considered qualified by sales are not ready to make a purchase1. They
need to be nurtured.
If that’s the case for you, you’re not alone—66% of marketers rank lead
nurturing as their biggest goal for 20172.
Below we offer a few ideas on how to cinch that saggy middle for a lean
and efficient marketing funnel.
Personalization
Boston Digital’s mantra, when it comes to personalization, is simple:
“Talk to me like you know me.”
At its core, personalization is about segmenting your audience into
personas based on data points, and then serving content that address the
needs of that persona at different stages along the buyer’s journey.
At the middle of the funnel, personalization can be the difference between
a cold, distant lead, who feels your company doesn’t really know them,
and a warm, close lead, who identifies with your brand because you have
demonstrated your understanding of that particular lead’s needs.
Demand Metric reports that 78% of CMOs3 believe personalized content
is “the future of marketing.” CMOs have a right to be optimistic. Strong
personalization strategies and tools result in:4
More conversions
Higher user engagement
Better lead generation
Increased customer lifetime value and loyalty
Yet, only 19% of businesses use it5. The reason? Personalization strategies are hard.
The data needed, the segmenting required, and the content strategy
necessary to bring it all together require a team of strategists who deeply
understand personalization.
READ BOSTON DIGITAL’S
PERSONALIZATION SERIES.
18 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
Remarketing
As new leads enter your funnel, a remarketing strategy can help nurture
leads by providing targeted messages based on known profile data and
user behavior. Unlike email nurture campaigns, remarketing enables you
to target users across multiple channels—from Facebook, LinkedIn, and
Twitter to the entirety of the Google Display Network, which accounts
for roughly 90% of Internet users worldwide7.
The goal of a strong nurture program that puts your brand in the
spotlight for potential prospects is to surround them with messaging.
If a user can only access your content through one channel (e.g.,
email), then you’re missing out—something your competitors may take
advantage of.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation platforms (MAPs) have become an essential tool in
any business’s marketing stack. More than 70% of businesses6 are using
a MAP to automate and streamline marketing tactics, especially when it
comes to nurturing prospects through the middle of the sales funnel.
Marketing automation can help marketing teams:
1. Segment audiences in real time according to profile data and user
behavior
2. Save time by automating repetitive and predictable tasks such as
welcome emails, lead scoring, communications with sales, and more.
3. Create detailed reports across all your marketing channels,
including your website, email, social media, paid media, etc.
4. Warm up cold leads through segmented and personalized email
drips, promoting content and offers to re-engage leads, and trigger
notification thresholds when leads signal they’re ready to talk.
LEARN MORE ABOUT MARKETING
AUTOMATION WITH BOSTON
DIGITAL’S INFOGRAPHIC.
y our A D
REMARKETING
19 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
“CLIENT SPOTLIGHT”
Five Start Senior Living Retargets Users Who Have Downloaded an
Ebook to Schedule a Tour of a Community Near Them.
Email Marketing
Perhaps one of the most reliable channels for communicating with
prospects, email marketing continues to drive success by connecting
with leads through targeted messaging. For today’s marketers, 91%
believe email7 is their most important channel for communicating and
distributing content to their contacts.
Why? Because email is truly a personalized communication channel.
While social media channels offer key insights into their users in general,
email provides instant access to the individual. Through advanced
segmentation, marketers can target users at the individual level if need
be.
Moreover, email is a reflection of trust. A lead offers his or her email
address to your business for a reason—to access content, to use a
tool, or to sample a product. Regardless of the reason, an implicit pact
is made between buyer and brand, and the messages you send are
reflective of the trust you’ve earned. Your messages are therefore more
likely to be clicked and read, to be shared, and to result in purchases8.
When done correctly, remarketing as a means of lead nurturing can be
just as targeted and personalized as email marketing. You can build
highly segmented lists and send specific messaging to users across the
web depending on your goals and the user’s known data.
1Gleanster Measuring the Impact of Lead Nurturing on the Sales Pipeline2Content Institute B2B Content Marketing 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends 3Demand Metric Content Marketing Infographic4eMarketer September 2016 Personalization Roundup5Forbes The Key To Personalization Is Data6Aberdeen Group State of Marketing Automation 2014: Processes that Produce7WordStream 10 Remarketing Facts to Make You Rethink Your Entire PPC Strategy
8Campaign Monitor 70 email marketing stats every marketer should know
20 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
Bottom of FunnelPERFECTING THE SHORT GAME
In golf, you can have the best drive of your life, but you’ll still end up with
a double bogey if you can’t putt the ball. The same is true in sales.
No matter how well your lead generation programs attract a new
audience, or how efficient your lead nurturing strategy warms those cold
leads, if you’re not prepared at the bottom of the funnel, you’ll still lose
the sale.
In this final section, let’s cover the key tactics for perfecting your short
game and closing the deal.
Sales Enablement
First, let’s start with a definition, as sales enablement is often considered
different things to different people.
“Sales enablement is the strategic process to equip all client-facing employees with the tools, knowledge, and content to create valuable conversations with customer stakeholders while improving the return on investment.”
With this definition in mind, you probably guessed correctly that sales
enablement is something you should consider at all stages of the
buyer’s/sales journey—not just here at the bottom.
But more often than not, most companies discover a flaw in their system
when it comes down to closing the deal. Usually, after a lost deal, the
team will perform a post-mortem and try to figure out what killed it, and
it’s at that point in the conversation that you’ll wish you had a strong
sales enablement strategy.
21 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL
To do it right, your sales enablement strategy must include:
1. An integration of CRM, marketing automation, and sales
enablement platforms
2. Buyer/customer persona playbooks used across the organization—
not just with sales
3. Content mapped across the buyer’s journey and each persona
4. Accessible content across all devices—no matter where you are
5. Measuring success through attribution
CRM Integration
If your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is just a tool
for storing customer information and is not integrated into your website,
you’re doing yourself an injustice.
A disparate setup means:
Your CRM data is never fully up-to-date
You waste precious time exporting data from the site and into your
CRM
You have to worry about human error affecting your data
You miss out on the automated tools that keep you abreast of all
pertinent lead information
True integration doesn’t just mean connecting your web forms to your
CRM database. With a well-integrated system, your sales team can:
Segment leads based on known data
Grade and prioritize leads
Nurture leads and monitor results
Reach out to leads instantly with no delays
Optimize Your Funnel
Aligning your funnel marketing strategy with your buyer’s journey will
help ensure leads continue to flow unimpeded from awareness through
decision. Address their needs through your funnel marketing strategy,
and make their choice an easy one.
Want to discuss your current funnel
marketing strategy and ways to improve it?
Contact (617) 241-7977
About Boston DigitalWe are Boston DigitalWe’re a tribe of tech and marketing fanatics helping brands find their Digital Mojo. We’re driven by untapped insights, high-tech experiences, and outcome-driven design to crush your marketing goals.
What is Digital Mojo?Digital Mojo is that special something that sets your brand apart. It’s the lens that all experiences, content and creative are developed through, ultimately connecting your brand to the people who need it most.
Our BeliefYour website is indistinguishable from your brand identity. It lives at the foundation of your digital ecosystem, so it’s the center of our attention. Digital excellence starts with a world-class website and catches fire with brilliant digital marketing.
For more information or to schedule a FREE consultation
Call (617) 241-7977 or visit bostondigital.com
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529 Main Street, Suite 212 | Charlestown, MA 02129 | BostonDigital.com